Title: The Lives of Desperate Girls
By: MacKenzie Common
Publication: September 19th 2017
By: Penguin Teen
Genre: YA-Contemporary-Mystery-Crime-ARC-Dark
One small, northern community. Two girls gone — one missing, the other dead. A riveting coming-of-age debut young adult novel for fans of Everything I Never Told You and All the Bright Places.
Sixteen-year-old Helen Commanda is found dead just outside Thunder Creek, Ontario. Her murder goes unremarked, except for the fact that it may shed light on the earlier disappearance of Chloe Shaughnessy. Chloe is beautiful, rich and white. Helen is plain, and from the reservation. They had nothing in common except that they were teenage girls from an unforgiving small town. Only Chloe’s best friend Jenny Parker knows exactly how unforgiving, but she’s keeping some dangerous secrets of her own.
Jenny begins looking for answers about Helen’s life and death, trying to understand larger questions about her town and her best friend. But what can a teenage girl really accomplish where adults have failed? And how much is Jenny actually complicit in a conspiracy of silence?
I want to thank NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with this copy in exchange for an honest review
Well, the thing is, I was reading Ice Like Fire, the second book of the Snow Like Ashes trilogy and I wasn’t feeling it, I was really in the mood for a mystery and murder reading and luckily I had this arc on my Kindle for some time already, so I thought it would be a good idea to read it. It wasn’t what I expected, at all, but still I want to talk about them in detail, first I want to emphasize the writing style, which is pretty easy to read
I will leave here below the Goodreads synopsis for the book so that you know what it’s about
“One small, northern community. Two girls gone — one missing, the other dead. A riveting coming-of-age debut young adult novel for fans of Everything I Never Told You and All the Bright Places.
Sixteen-year-old Helen Commanda is found dead just outside Thunder Creek, Ontario. Her murder goes unremarked, except for the fact that it may shed light on the earlier disappearance of Chloe Shaughnessy. Chloe is beautiful, rich and white. Helen is plain, and from the reservation. They had nothing in common except that they were teenage girls from an unforgiving small town. Only Chloe’s best friend Jenny Parker knows exactly how unforgiving, but she’s keeping some dangerous secrets of her own.
Jenny begins looking for answers about Helen’s life and death, trying to understand larger questions about her town and her best friend. But what can a teenage girl really accomplish where adults have failed? And how much is Jenny actually complicit in a conspiracy of silence?”
I started enjoying it a lot, especially the mystery vibe that is handled in the book is very good and enthralling, but then Jenny, our main character, begins to have all these completely ridiculous and meaningless attitudes. First her way of dealing with loss is the rarest, I’ve read that some people believe that is her way of dealing with it, but I don’t agree, her behavior as if nothing matters I thought it was absurd.
I understand that she really wanted to find her friend and solve what was going on, but suddenly she started to flee almost from the police as if they were the enemy, then she passes like 60% of the book with her super hot guy, doing basically nothing relevant and the other percentage passes by looking for her friend putting herself in danger without any sense and hiding very important details from the police, because she actually thinks she’s protecting her friend, I mean, WHAT ?, they want to find her!.In moments of desperation I understand that you can forget to comment a really important things, but she was hiding that from the police because she wanted to do it, which only made research even more difficult.
This was crazy for me one of the most absurd characters I’ve read, and I really hate talking this way about a creation that someone did with effort and love, but it hasn’t worked for me. Jenny is the typical beautiful and rich girl who thinks she knows everything about life because she get drugged a couple of times and then she think she’s smart enough to solve a crime on her own, but she just makes a mess, and that’s all she’s been for me
On the other hand, I could see how the author wanted to touch important issues like abuse, bullying, indifference, racism, and depression, I appreciate that and I want to highlight it, even so it isn’t a book that going to stay with me
Anyway, I would try another book of the author, because I think her writing style is nice and maybe with the development of other types of characters more deep and complex could hook me more and I would end up liking me more her book
Summing up, is a great idea for a mystery plot but the characters are flat and their actions don’t make sense most of the time
It’s always tough to write a poor review. At least, I think it is. Otoh…I don’t see myself reading this book either, if the main character is as bad as you say she is.
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It’s very difficult Yeah, I really want to be respectful because I know someone took her time to write it and could have been so good, but that main character was the worst. Thanks for reading 😊
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I’m reading this book right now and I totally agree with a lot of what you said. Might DNF it soon, but I’m sticking around for the discussion on the important topics you listed. Nice review!
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Thanks❤. I would really love to hear your opinion about it, let me know 😊
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